Elsewhere

Not a whole lot of blogging time for me today, so here are some things to read:

Marc Ambinder coins the term “Doddnovations“:

Dodd has plenty of intangibles, but they’re not the intangibles this election cycle is rewarding so far. That said, his campaign itself is near flawless; his argument is pitch-perfect and attuned to his audience. He regularly creates landfill between himself and his opponents; he’s the first out of the box with attractive policy ideas, like a carbon tax. And, especially for a campaign run largely by veterans of Washington, he’s used emerging technologies more fruitfully than just about everyone else.

Meanwhile, on the anniversary of Obama’s speech against the Iraq war, the Dodd campaign reminds us of something else Obama said years ago in a release quoting the New York Times:

“In a recent interview, he declined to criticize Senators Kerry and Edwards for voting to authorize the war, although he said he would not have done the same based on the information he had at the time. ‘But, I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.’” [The New York Times, 7/26/04]

Mitt Romney has run 10,000 TV ads already.

Markos thinks pragmatically about Edwards.

The media reports that Josh Orton, Obama’s blogger outreach guy, resigned over differences with the campaign about online strategy.

And Obama turns what many expected to be a day of vanity, highlighting a speech he made years ago, into a day of substantive foreign policy discussion.

(And a brief side-note: this evening in Coralville, both Fred Thompson and Barack Obama are speaking at the same hotel but for different events. Iowa Independent’s T.M. Lindsey called me to report that as of 4:25PM, Fred Thompson, who is scheduled earlier than Obama, is running late. It will be interesting if somehow one event interferes with the other.)